Yes, it’s been three weeks since we saw each other. Yes, we have a lot to catch up on. Yes, we draw something out of the Hat. But let’s be real here, people… we mostly just talk about Wonder Woman. Enjoy!
QUESTIONS:
Have you, or would you, work overtime for your employer? –Stu (written during overtime)
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I feel like such a sourpuss, because you both liked Wonder Women way more than I did, and also I keep reading about all the positive emotional reactions people have to it. I find that the finger prints of Zac Snyder in the the writing are still prominent to me. And the tropes overall, especially in the ending, bothered me. The ending especially because the trope there undercut the main overall message. If I were comparing it just with other super hero movies, I’d say maybe it would be in my top ten, but toward the bottom half.
Well, you’re usually right about stuff, Jas…. so you were due to be wrong about something. 😉
We still love you!
:p
Love you guys too.
Actually, I’ve seen many people with the same opinion, and I understand it. For some reason, while I agree with many of the criticisms of the film, none of those criticisms have significantly diminished it for me. In my mind, the positives overwhelmingly outweigh the negatives.
I think it’s fair to say, though, that I do give superhero stories a lot of passes to begin with, and maybe DC stories in particular, for sentimental reasons.
Well you know I love superhero stories. 🙂
I think I probably am pretty critical of them in some ways though because I think of them as having fairly strong mythic or ideological messages, and so many more people see them and know about them than a lot of other types of stories. In other words, I am concerned about their cultural impact more than most other stories.
And then the other piece of this is that while I understand the importance of representation, I think of representation as at a kind of surface level and if the representation changes but the overall value system isn’t changed, then in some ways, that seems worse to me, because its an illusion of change. That would be a kind of general criticism I have of the Steinem/Friedan brand of feminism.
Parts of Wonder Woman did challenge the value system. I think most of that happened in the middle of the film. But then the overall plot arc did not to my mind, and wound up reinforcing some messages that I find really toxic in our culture (mostly about war and peace rather than about gender).
Right. But in those regards, Wonder Woman didn’t seem, to me, to be worse than other superhero movies. I could easily be wrong about that, though. I’m often wrong about things. 🙂
Would you say that, on your personal top ten superhero movies list, the ones you’d rate above Wonder Woman did a better job avoiding and/or challenging toxic messages about war and peace?
Just comparing Wonder Woman to my previous best superhero movie pick, Iron Man… I mean, Stark seemed to feel bad about being a war profiteer in the film, but his solution was to turn himself into a war machine and determine that he, personally, could be trusted to decide for everyone else when it was OK to use tactics and weapons of war. And I think the reason he believed he was qualified to do this was because he was demonstrably better at STEM than anybody else. Which also made him richer than everybody else, feeding into the popular notion that if a person is richer than other people it’s because they’re actually better than other people. So, yeah… lots of problematic stuff there about war and class and other stuff, and that’s without taking note of Pepper Pots calling a woman who stayed over at Tony’s house “trash”, presumably for no other reason than that the woman had stayed over at Tony’s house.
And that’s the superhero movie that, until Wonder Woman, I felt outranked all the rest.
Maybe I’m just not good at ranking superhero movies? 😉
Sorry, I probably left two incorrect impressions in my previous posts. Generally, I don’t like top 10 or whatever lists, ’cause I find I’m always comparing apples to oranges in some way. I was mostly using that context to contrast your reaction and Tony’s with mine. And, in superhero movies, I’m not always looking at war/peace issues. Actually the overt message of Wonder Woman, which is that our connection to others is what can save the world, is probably what it has in common with many of my favorite SH films (The Dark Knight, Spiderman II, Guardians both I & II, and even, I’d argue, Iron Man I). But that overt message was undercut for me in ways that it was not in those other films. The main way was in what happened with the villain and his disguise. (Spoilers below)
The fact that the villain is hiding as someone who is a diplomat, a man who is suing for peace, and that his argument that the superhero and her band of fighters might undermine peace by an act of aggression, the fact that all of that turns out to be the mask that Area is hiding under is the message hidden beneath that more positive explicit message. The implicit message is that the people you can’t trust are the diplomats, the ones who try to talk their way out of violence, especially when they are trying to talk the good heroic people out of acts of violence and aggression. Because only the good who use violence for the good can actually bring about peace and love–which to me is basically the lie Americans keep telling themselves to justify war.
In Iron Man, yeah, I see some of what you are saying–though I think the criticisms of Iron Man as war machine apply equally to Diana as a weapon. And his riches and STEM knowledge are analogous to the messianic religious symbolism around Diana. But for the most part I buy into them as heroes. His saving a village and her saving a village both have positive moral weight to me. It’s mostly the choice of villain that’s different. In Iron Man, the message is not, don’t trust the peacemakers, it’s don’t trust the military industrial complex. And yes, I realize that Stark is not totally removed from that by his renouncing it at the beginning, but (and this may just be my reading of the film), I think we are supposed to continue to be critical of him in a way that allows us to continue to be critical of him as war machine.
Understood.
(POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD)
Of course, as you suggest, there’s much to consider in how one reads a narrative. I didn’t pick up the “treacherous peacenik” vibe from the story at all. I thought about how the treaties after WWI contributed significantly to the body of historical events we classify as “the causes of WWII”, which ultimately led to the development of a worldwide nuclear weapons stockpile that, today, has the capability of wiping out all of human life. So, well played, Ares!
I thought about how often tyrants do promise peace, not just through violence, but also through treaties and trade deals and the like, in order to secure footholds in various areas. (Ain’t corporate imperialism grand?) And I thought about how empires often present two competing parties to a population, creating the illusion of choice, when both those parties actually stand for two versions of the same kind of oppression.
Besides all that, I didn’t perceive the Sir Patrick Morgan character as being anti-war, per se. Like the general that Diana scolded, who also advocated for armistice and wanted Steve to do nothing that would threaten it… clearly not anti-war, just pro-armistice-that-will-put-Britain-in-a-powerful-post-war-position. Sir Patrick, after all, did not speak up following the, “That’s what soldiers do,” line.
Then later, when Sir Patrick did offered to help Steve and Diana destroy not just the poison and not just the general and Dr. Poison, but probably many other people as well… that didn’t seem particularly dovish to me.
As I’m discussing this, it makes me wonder if I just have a prejudice against colonial Brits. Like, “That guy isn’t a true advocate of peace and diplomacy! He’s a knighted Brit who was born in the 19th century! For guys like that, words like ‘peace’ and ‘prosperity’ were always code for ‘control’ and ‘corruption’!”
Yeah, that’s probably it. 😉
Maybe you talk about this later in the episode, but the intro was playing twice, slightly out of sync with itself this time. It almost worked like an echo effect.
Tony, what horrible thing did you did to be required to remain so close to a school?
Moleman: I’m quite certain Moleman has been mentioned before, but I don’t recall the full “gay for Moleman” story being previously explained.
It’s been three weeks… I’m not sure why, maybe because my wife has been watching so much Father Brown, but when you said “it’s been three weeks” I totally thought you were going to follow that up with “.. since my last confession.”
Wonder Woman: It’s not a perfect movie by a long shot, but it was a great deal of fun. My no spoiler review was it’s at least as good as any of the early Marvel films. If it had been put out back around when the first Iron Man film did; then DC would likely be rolling in money like Marvel currently is. Especially if DC could follow this up with more, similar quality movies.
GofGv2: I liked it, but not as much as the first one.
Robin Wright: Yup, totally amazing in Wonder Woman and that reminds me I still need to watch House of Cards.
Justice League: Based on the the trailers for this, I’m expecting it to suck like a Dyson. But if they give it lots of Wonder Woman screen time… maybe I’ll try catching it at the cheap seats.
Black Panther trailer: Huh, apparently I’m not culturally sensitive enough to pick up on that possibility. I just thought it looked cool.
Overtime: Yes, plenty of times. Like Tony, I prefer not to. With prior jobs, I would frequently work extra hours early in the week to take off early on a Friday (building up comp. time).
Dungeon World campaign: Cool, tell us more. 😀
Mark, when you say “suck like a Dyson” do you mean that it does a good job of sucking (like a movie you love to hate) or that it just keeps sucking (it’s terrible and there’s nothing good about it).